


bedtime story

by becausemagnets



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Canon Disabled Character, Canonical Character Death, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, F/F, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 12:22:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4435313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/becausemagnets/pseuds/becausemagnets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles has made some bad decisions. Buying weed from Erik Lehnsherr in a school playground is just one in a long string of bad decisions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bedtime story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crocodilepatronus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crocodilepatronus/gifts).



> this was originally for the "Treat Yo Self" challenge and I. didn't finish it. 
> 
> and then I was going to finish it for croc's birthday and I. edited it? maybe I wrote the last scene. 
> 
> anyway! here it is! it seems unfinished because it is! there was a lot of set up for stuff and I did intend to go through with that set up, but it'd be like a 100k fic and I can't commit to that right now.

He’d heard about this guy that sold weed up in the jungle gym at an elementary school playground in Westchester. Charles has done his best to avoid returning to Westchester and the likely boarded up and dust filled mansion he’d inherited after his mother’s death as well as even the softest of drugs since a minor overdose on a major drug caused some scandal in the national news, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Raven Darkholme, formerly Xavier, was coming for his mother’s funeral. He needed at least the weed to get through that experience. Hopefully she had the grace to check herself into a hotel. 

He wheels himself across the asphalt parking lot, unsure how he’s going to deal with the wood chips when the lot ends. His “associate,” Azazel, had told him that usually you had to climb up into the little treehouse structure to meet the guy, that he wouldn’t come down for anyone, but Charles Xavier, now sole heir to Xavier fortune, wasn’t just anybody. He gets himself right to the edge of the parking lot, over the yellow foursquare paint and in the shadow of the huge metal and poly-fiber treehouse. He’s not sure what to do. How to alert the attention of this shady drug dealer who preferred the safety and anonymity of a hiding spot you had to use a huge blue climbing ladder to get to, its escape route a closed red slide with plexiglass windows on the side. 

As it turns out, he didn’t have to. The man came swinging down from the entrance to the slide, half of his face in shadow. He was wearing a turtleneck and tight black pants that showed off a lean, lanky frame, hardly the dress expected for the temperature, hour, setting, or job description, but it all suited him in a sort of 1940’s Al Capone bootlegger way. His hair is slicked back against his skull, dark in the night, but almost gold when a street light catches it as he uses the blue ladder like monkey bars, landing gracefully and with ease in the wood chips underneath. 

“Charles Xavier.” His voice is an arrow straight to heart, cutting through the thick, muggy late summer air and straight to Charles’s chest. He swallows around a new lump in his throat. He doesn’t bother asking the man how he knows his name. Everyone knows his name. He also doesn’t bother asking the man his. In his experience, it’s better not to know the sorts of names that these types of people come up with. 

“In the flesh. I’ve heard from some former friends of mine that you have a product that I’m very interested in buying.” He crosses his arms over his chest, feigning East coast disinterest in the whole interaction. In truth, he’s pretty interested in this guy. The way he dresses and his mannerisms seem like something closer to Charles’s world than the underground, but Charles knows better than anyone that the US Senate is less likely to pass a drug test than the people receiving welfare checks. 

“Well, I’ve heard from some friends of mine that you’re after something harder than what I usually sell. I can get you some, if that’s what you want. Just not tonight.” The man mirrors his posture, inspecting his nails. They seem perfectly manicured. 

“Did you expect me tonight?” His voice betrays a little more of apprehension than he would have liked. 

“In truth, I was hoping.” His smile is almost sinister, all teeth. They’re white enough to flash in the lowlight of the parking lot. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for quite some time.” 

“Me? Why on earth would you want to meet me?” The man shrugs, and Charles doesn’t press. He reaches in the bag slung across the back of his wheelchair for his wallet. “Well. What do you have to offer? Anything harder than your usual fare?” 

“Are you stocking up or just trying to take the edge off?” 

“The edge off. I’m sure you’ve heard that my mother’s visitation is tomorrow.” 

“I had heard that, yeah. I have about ten Xanax and maybe six Oxy. Will that get you through? I can get you the good stuff tomorrow. Maybe even some hypomorphine if that’s something you’re…” The man trails off. 

Charles presses two crisp hundred dollar bills into his hand. “Give what you have and come to the wake tomorrow. Bring the stuff.” 

The man slips the money into his back pocket, still grinning his shark grin. “Don’t you want to know my name first? Before you hand over your daddy’s hard earned cash.” 

“See you tomorrow.”  
\-- 

Erik Lehnsherr shows up at the Xavier mansion in the only suit he owns, having stolen an iron from a Sears to press the creases out of it. It had belonged to his father, one of the only things he’d managed to save before his life turned to ashes. He has enough heroin to kill an elephant and a hypodermic needle in his pocket. 

He spots Irene Darkholme first. Destiny. She’d worked for Shaw before Erik had gotten out. It seemed that Shaw’s operation had taken its toll on her as well. She’s clinging to Raven Xavier’s arm, a cane slung on a string across her arm. She’s still strikingly beautiful, enough to make his gut drop a little, and he remembers the nights when he had watched her dance in the smoke filled backroom of the Hellfire Club, hoping someday he’d have the courage to actually strike up a conversation with her. It isn’t exactly a shock to see her with Raven. She and Charles had always been in the public eye for their less than traditional sexual liaisons. Marrying a former stripper and taking her last name is just another way to make sure that there are more than enough nails in Sharon Xavier’s coffin. 

There were rumors that Raven was Brian Xavier’s illegitimate child, conceived while he had been working overseas with notorious playboy Howard Stark, and Erik can see why people would believe it. Her eyes were the same clear lake water blue as Charles, almond shaped, and her cheekbones held on to baby fat and an innocent ruddiness the same way Brian Xavier’s had, even late into his life. But Sharon and Charles had both denied it vehemently, both parroting the same story about Charles having found her as an orphan while attending boarding school. Although this story never fully explained why Sharon Xavier, who had such a hard time conceiving an heir to the Xavier fortune, would be so threatened by an orphan child her son brought back with him on spring break. 

He doesn’t see Charles. He knows that Destiny--Irene--won’t recognize him by his voice alone. His voice hadn’t dropped yet when he started working for Shaw, and besides, they’d never been close. He knows it’s bold to approach Raven, but he wants to get in and get out of here as fast as possible. This is the kind of attention he’d been trying to avoid since he got out of the Hellfire Club. The kind of people he’d been trying to avoid his whole life. 

“Excuse me, Mrs. Darkholme? Raven?” She turns her lake water blue eyes to him, her mouth a thin, persed Westchester line. Her eyes are more hawk than human. Erik even thinks he spots a gold rim around the iris, flashing against the white gold around her neck. She pats Irene’s arm to stop her, gripping her tight. Her fingernails are professionally pointed into claws, painted black, digging hard enough into Irene to leave little scratches. A bird of prey. “I’m an associate of your brother’s. I just came to pay my respects to him and then I’ll be on my way. Do you know where he is?” 

Her eyes narrow and flash that sickening gold around her iris again. She smoothes her dress, a mermaid tail blue with a black sash around the waist, alarmingly bold in a sea of black besides the fact that it looks like it’s painted onto her bare body. He would gladly let her thighs squeeze the life out of him, but that’s not why he’s here. His fingers curl around the needle, rolling it between his middle finger and his thumb. “Do I know you?” 

“I doubt it. We might have some friends in common.” Emma Frost. Azazel. Angel. Klaus Schmidt--Sebastian Shaw. They aren’t the kind of friends you’d want to have in common. 

“How are you _associated_ with my brother?” Her eyes flick up and down his suit. It’s not designer, the only not designer suit in the room. And it’d been made to fit his father, a shorter, huskier man than Erik himself. It hung in places it shouldn’t hang and clung in places it shouldn’t cling. He didn’t feel self-conscious, though. He had never felt like he belonged in places like this, the smell of too many flowers and too much perfume crowding the room and bringing back memories of the taste in the back of his throat at his own parents’ wake. 

“I’m afraid you’ll have to ask him that, ma'am. If you could just tell me where he is.” Turning turning turning the needle in his hand, thinking about sinking it into Charles Xavier’s blue blue blue veins. Watching it get swallowed up and drown him. 

“Another hustler,” she mouths against Destiny’s ear. A small smile plays against her lips when she turns her eyes back on Erik, no hint of the gold rim now. “He’s upstairs, in his childhood bedroom in the east wing. Take the main staircase, then a left, six doors down. I’m sure he’s expecting you.” Her smile twists, wry, highlighting how high her cheekbones are. “The bed is still a four poster twin. It creaks.” 

His shoes, freshly polished, clack ominously as he ascends the marble staircase, one hand loosely tracing the bannister, the other still turning turning turning the needle. He feels the eyes on him like heat on his back, but he disappears into the wing, counts the doors as turns of the needle. 

Charles is pressed up against an old oak desk, the initials BFX carved into the huge mantelpiece above it. It’s crammed into the room, obviously a new addition. The whole room smells like wood cleaner and opiate sick. The kind of sick that runs soul deep. Charles doesn’t turn around. 

“Are you a good shot?” he asks, his voice somehow diminished in the large house, like he’s a ghost. He loosens the knot of his tie, pulls it out from his collar. He takes off his cufflinks, solid gold, one C, one X, letting them fall heavy against the oak, and pushes one of his sleeves. He pulls the tie taut across his bicep, strong from using them to as his only means of moving around, and ties a strong knot, making a fist. 

Erik uncaps the needle in his pocket. “Got a spoon?” Erik has a lighter tucked in his back pocket. It’s rubbed a hole in his suit pants. Charles pulls a spoon, already black on the bottom, out of the drawer. It, too, is monogrammed with is father’s initials. Erik takes it lightly between his fingers and dumps in enough of the sticky yellow powder for a good hit. Charles watches him like a hungry dog, the opening of the little baggie Pavlov’s bell. He practically moans when the first bubbles appear in the spoon, the thick, tar smoke charring up Erik’s nose. He sticks the needle in, sucks it up, taps it with the nail of his middle finger, watching all the bubbles dissipate as the heroin settles, looking as yellow and sick and full of rot as the sweat clinging to Charles smells. 

He hits Charles’s vein, and they both let out a groan, eyes flickering up to meet each other. Charles’s eyes roll up in his head and he lolls back against his chair, his wheels spinning. Erik holds off the vein and pulls the needle out. “Got any place in particular for this?” He puts the cap back on. Charles indicates, vaguely, a small wire wastebasket in the corner of the room. Erik tosses it overhand. It bounces off the wall and into the basket. 

“Double good shot.” Charles’s laugh sounds like it’s coming from his throat alone, nasally and pinched. He lifts himself out of his chair with his arms, dragging his dead legs like they weigh nothing. He lays back on the twin bed, sinking against the wall to leave enough room for Erik, should he decide to take it. Erik sits cross-legged on the floor instead. 

“Sometimes, when I’m this high…” Charles is tracing an old crack on the wall, smiling at it like it’s a familiar friend. “I forget that my legs just aren’t asleep or something. I remember what it’s like to walk. To bend my knees. To run with the other kids.” His pupils are blown, black holes swallowing up all the blue. 

“Does it feel like they’re asleep? Your legs?” 

“When I’m high. They tingle a little.” 

“Can you feel anything?” 

Charles laughs, still nasally, still pinched. From disuse. “You know, I’ve never told anyone that, so I’ve never tested it out. Would you like to?” There’s no intent in his voice. He lets his arms drop to his side and his eyes slip shut. Not a full nod, but a tremor, a quick heroin paralysis. 

Erik puts his fingers around Charles’s ankle, lightly, pushing his pants up, inching up his sock until he’s touching bare skin. He rubs his thumb along that stretch of skin, as white as paper as it never sees the day. Charles remains motionless. He inches up, pressing his whole palm against Charles’s shin. Nothing. Around his kneecap. Erik barely brushes Charles’s inner thigh, over his pants, and Charles’s eyes snap open. Erik jumps, jerking his hand back like he’s touched flame. “I felt that.” His voice is hushed, as if afraid to disturb his own body. “Do that again. Please.” 

Erik brushes his fingers against Charles’s thigh, the same spot, and he feels the shiver run down Charles’s spine. His face breaks into a slow, dull grin, the kind of cheap, lazy euphoria that can only be delivered intravenously. Erik presses his lips against the same spot, parting them, leaving a small wet spot. 

“I--you’re--” Charles runs a hand through his hair, craning his shoulders. “I can’t, you know. Feel it in--you know.” His cheeks color, spreading slowly as if his blood can’t move fast enough in his body, turned to molasses. 

Erik lifts his head, digging his thumb into the same spot. “I don’t care. There are plenty of ways to get off, Charles. You still come in your dreams, don’t you?” He mouths the spot again, working it harder, hoping he can leave a mark through his pants. Charles moans and Erik feels a tentative hand ghost over his head. He lifts his head up, almost like a cat preening, and Charles’s fingers sink in, messing up the perfect, smoothed lines of his hair. 

“What’s your name?” Charles gasps as Erik runs his teeth along the spot he’s worked over with his mouth. He sinks his thumb in again, as if holding off a vein. Holding off the only spot Charles can feel him. “Your real name.” 

“Erik. Erik Lehnsherr.”  
\-- 

When he gets his head out of the toilet the next day, Logan Howlett is at his bathroom door, his arms crossed over his broad chest. Charles likes to imagine that if he could stand, he’d be a whole head taller than Logan, but as it is, Logan is only a head taller than him. And probably a solid two hundred pounds of muscle, a brick wall of a man. His hair is standing up at the sides like it always is, pressed flat in the middle, and his clothes smell like stale cigars and marijuana. He’s one of Charles’s oldest friends, another stray he’d managed to pick up between boarding school and college when he’d spent some time wandering around, mostly doing peyote with cowboy types and waking up in the apartments above South American bars. Logan had been one of the people he vaguely remembered waking up with, one of the cowboy types, but he hadn’t remembered the night before. Logan did. 

Logan had come to find him with only the clothes on his back when he’d heard about the accident. He’d stayed since then, mostly trying to keep Charles off of smack and onto softer stuff, but he’d had his own dalliances with hard women and fast drugs and now they both sort of danced around each other, skirting around the fact that Charles couldn’t really offer what Logan was looking for anymore and that Logan had proven woefully ineffective as his self-appointed bodyguard. 

Charles squeezes the bridge of his nose, feeling tired in all the parts of his body that he can feel, the weight of it all resting like a stone between his shoulder blades. He’s not dopesick, but he may as well be--dope hungover. The bags under his eyes are deep enough he can feel them with his fingers. His cell has being ringing off the hook, lawyers trying to get ahold of him and settle the disputes about the late Sharon Xavier-Marko’s estate. He should have known that Cain would surface at some point, sniffing the money trail the same way Raven Darkholme-nee-Xavier had. “What do you want, Logan? I don’t really have the time.” 

“What was Erik Lehnsherr doing here yesterday?” 

Charles widens his eyes, blinking rapidly. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you’re talking about.” 

Logan growls low in his throat and grabs the handles of Charles’s chair, pushing him tight against Logan’s tree trunk legs so he has nowhere to look but the center of Logan’s chest. “Don’t play coy with me, Xavier. He used to be a big time pusher. And a hustler. One of those rats at the Hellfire Club. You don’t want to get mixed up in that stuff right now.” 

“And I suppose this is your altruistic way of saying you’ll take care of him if only I bat my eyelashes and ask?” Charles jerks his chair around with all of his strength, slamming the metal foot brace hard into Logan’s leg, but Logan doesn’t even look like he registers pain anymore. 

“It’s not like that anymore. I look out for you because you looked out for me. That’s it.” Charles makes a low sound of derision in his throat, breathing through his mouth so he doesn’t have to keep swallowing Logan’s musk, the taste of ash already thick in the back of his mouth. “Look, I think Lehnsherr had something to do with Shaw getting killed, okay? And, you know, the stuff with Marko and Shaw and your father, it wouldn’t look good for _TMZ_ to see you out with Lehnsherr. People might start asking the right questions.” 

Charles glowers at him, putting his hands over Logan’s on his hand rests, shoving hard. Logan lets go, but he doesn’t move out of the doorway. “You know very well what I was doing with him and what you or _TMZ_ think of me right now is really not high on my list of priorities.” 

“I thought we got you off of that stuff.” Logan’s voice gets even gruffer, sandpaper over his vocal cords, but there’s a softness to his eyes that would make Charles feel guilty if he was capable of feeling anything but bone deep apathy any longer. 

“ _We_ did not do anything in that regard. _I_ went through a strenuous rehabilitation program after an accidental overdose and _I_ have made the decision to fall back on old habits considering the present circumstances. You and Erik Lehnsherr have nothing to do it with.” 

“Oh, so you shot yourself up yesterday?” Charles closes his eyes and imagines Logan’s head exploding. If only he had the power. “Listen to me, Charles. You don’t want to give Cain or Raven anymore ammunition than they have. If they know you’re back on smack--” 

“And how would they? Are you going to tell them?” 

“If it gets anything like last time--” 

“Believe me, Logan. It won’t. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my mother’s funeral is about to start. I think more people would talk if I wasn’t present.” 

Logan steps aside, looking as though he’s biting the inside of his cheek to keep from saying what he really wants. 

Raven presses herself tight to the end of the pew at the church, close enough that a blond wisp of her hair brushes against his cheek. It’s one of those strong sensory memories, bringing back all the summers at the mansion when they’d lay back against the trampoline, sweating and tired and content to have their limbs tangled together, thinking that nothing could ever change between them. That the swelling in their chests, the eternal summer, would never die. How quickly all of that makes the bile rise back up into his mouth is a testament to how truly dead that eternal summer is. Her nails are like daggers against his palm and the skin-on-skin contact makes him feel like he’s ducked his head underwater. He hasn’t seen Raven in nearly ten years. She’d been little more than a girl when she left, but all the elements of the woman taking all the air out of the room now had been present then. He’d just been willfully blind to them, thinking he’d found one person in his life he wouldn’t lose. 

“Destiny told me about your little friend.” Charles can feel the stain her lipstick leaves on his ear, oily and heavy. He makes no move to wipe it off. 

“I do wish you’d stop calling her that dreadful name. Irene is a lovely name.” He can feel the heat of eyes turned in their directions, but no flashbulbs yet. Probably out of respect for the dead. The late Sharon Xavier would have wanted nothing more than the two of them in a page six photograph together. 

“You should hear what they used to call Lehnsherr.” 

“I’d rather not. I don’t know what you expect me to say to all of this, but I’m not really concerned with what my drug dealer might have been doing with your wife ten years ago.” 

“Drug dealer? Is that what we’re calling it these days?” 

“I don’t have to pay for people to keep me company, Raven, no matter what you might think.” 

“No, I suppose you don’t. You’ve got Logan for that.” 

“Is there something that you want, Raven?” It doesn’t come out as terse as he’d like it. He’s too tired to even sound angry, let alone muster up the actual emotion. 

“No, I think you’ve given me all the information I need.” She leans back, putting her hand in Irene’s lap, acting as though she can’t even see Charles at the end of pew.  
\--

He hears the clicking of her heels on the asphalt before he sees her under the street light, her clothes so opulent white that she seems ethereal, a visitation. The only evidence that she’s not is the peak of dark roots at the top of her head, a calculated oversight. Emma Frost hasn’t been human in a long time. 

He swings down the ladder like usual, dropping and scattering the wood chips under his feet. Her lips, frosted blue, turn up at the corner, her patented smirk. He doesn’t take any steps closer to her and she doesn’t take any steps closer to him. “How’d you know to find me here?” 

“You’ve made some high profile friends the last few days. My scent dogs could follow your trail pretty easily after that.” She raises her purse higher on her shoulder, her nails flashing like they’ve been painted with diamonds. Maybe they have. She could afford it. 

“Xavier.” 

“Xavier,” she agrees, her eyes shining brighter in the dim light. He remembers those eyes close up, so full of blue he thought he’d drown. It was only by the grace of God that he never did. His burning desire to never become what Sebastian Shaw had wanted him to be. She used to trace a fingernail down his face when he’d shoot her up before the shows, and in the darkness afforded them in the small backstage dressing room, basically a closet, she’d press gentle kisses to his temples and tell him what one day they’d both make it out. That they could run away together someday. He’d believed her. That was his own fault. It had taken him a long time to realize that what had happened to them both since was not. 

“What brings you all the way out to Westchester?” He can think of only one thing, but he doesn’t want to breathe life into old demons. 

Emma has no such reservations. “You have some things you need to answer for. Some vacancies you have left to fill in New York.” 

“You’ve seemed perfectly capable of finding people to fill them so far.” 

“I was always meant to serve as your interim. It’s your inheritance, Erik, not mine.” 

“I thought they called you the usurper when you kill the king.” 

She laughs at him. It’s just as disconcerting as he remembers, almost like she’s laughing inside his head. “It doesn’t matter if you’re the king’s son. You have business to attend to. It’s time to stop running.” 

Erik takes a step towards her, expecting her to step back in answer, but she doesn’t. The corner of her frosted lips twitch up and she blinks, her eyelashes looking as white as the rest of her. He closes the distance between them, taking long, tentative strides--a hunter towards a deer. Usually the deer isn’t staring straight at the hunter with eyes threatening to swallow him whole, though. “Have you missed me that much, Emma? That’d you follow me all over the world until I settled down? Did I mean that much to you?” 

“No. He did.” The answer is so startlingly simple, it’s like a punch to the gut. He traces his finger over her cheek the same way she’d done all those years ago anyway, refusing to let her throw him off balance. “You were just a boy, Erik. None of us could have known how it would turn out.” 

“Well, I’m a man now.” 

“Yes. Yes, you are.”  
\-- 

Erik carries him up the red, fiberglass steps, molded like chain link. Across the shaking bridge held together by metal covered in the same rubbery, waxy fiberglass, some of it fraying off and revealing the rust underneath. Up another set up stairs, much steeper, and into the domed treehouse structure, a veritable castle in the middle of a Westchester elementary school. Charles holds his breath, not used to being carried at all, especially for such long distances, but Erik’s chest rises easy against his side and his muscles seem taut, strong, but not tired or strained. “Relax, Charles. You’ve got bird bones.” Erik’s voice tickles up his spine like a promise, dying right where the bullet had entered his spine. Forming new scar tissue over the old. Charles will never be able to relax around Erik, not after the last time. 

He’d convinced himself that the drugs had given him a very powerful delusion, accepted the fact that heroin was certainly not the answer to that particular problem, but it had felt so real. More real than any of the dreams where he could walk and fuck again. He could always feel Erik’s lips against that spot, call it right to his mind and have it happen all over again. His body was starting to respond in kind, all of his synapses that still worked firing at warp speed, trying to get those parts of his body to wake up again. It’s exhausting, troubling, dangerous. For both of them. 

Erik props himself against a plexiglass porthole overlooking the swings, back to the view. He shimmies a crushed pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of his back pocket, all the metal scarred black from lighting things much more sinister than tobacco. He breathes in the smoke and pushes it out through his nose, a dragon in the tower. Charles falls back against the steps leading to an open slide, peeking through the little plastic red roof to the starless sky. “Thanks for bringing me up here,” he breathes, his eyelids feeling heavy in the late summer air. He can smell fall in the leaves, starting to turn despite their best efforts to cling to the last of the warm weather. All early reports said it was going to be a harsh winter. Charles was inclined to believe them. “It’s beautiful.” 

Erik chuckles, the ember of his cigarette the only light between them, casting his face into eerie, flickering shadow. “It’s nothing special.” He pauses, flicking a bit of ash between the slates of the fiberglass chain link underneath them. “Your sister, Raven, she went to school here, didn’t she?” 

Charles nods, realizes Erik probably can’t see him, and clears his throat. “Yeah, yes, she did. My mother felt it was inappropriate to ship her off to boarding school considering she was adopted, but I think she just didn’t want to spend the money.” 

“She wasn’t overly fond of Raven, then.” 

Not a question, but Charles answers anyway. “Is anyone? You’ve met her. Tell me what you make of her.” 

Erik stubs his cigarette out of the bottom of his boot, blowing all of the smoke up into the roof of the treehouse. “Honestly… She’s a hard read. More complicated than meets the eye, I think.”

It’s Charles’s turn to chuckle, spreading his arms out through the slats of the railing. “Oh, she’s not very complicated. She’s a pariah.” Erik makes a soft sound, somewhere between agreement and indifference, and Charles lifts his head, staring at the shadow he casts along the floor between them, larger than it should be. “You don’t believe me? She told me you knew Destiny. From before.” Erik makes that same sound and pulls out another cigarette, plainly refusing to contribute to the conversation unless provoked. “Were you a stripper too, then?” 

Erik breathes into fast and coughs up all the smoke. “No, no I wasn’t a stripper. I was a--an errand boy, for lack of a better word. Made arrangements to make the girls’ lives easier. Collected payments. Dropped off packages. Talked to big important men when they were afraid about the returns on their investments or the papers getting wind of who they were hanging around. Men like your dad, and Marko.” 

“You knew my dad?” Charles props himself up on his elbows, his mouth falling open. Erik’s face is turned away from him, his profile stark with all the light behind him. He looks like an engraving, a Roman carving. A medieval statute, turned to stone and too old for Charles to touch without him crumbling. 

“Not well. I knew Marko better. I was there when he--died.” 

Charles feels like he’ll never catch his breath again, his mouth wide and gasping for air. It feels suddenly thin up there in the treehouse, like he’ll never get enough to his brain. “So was I,” Charles pushes out, his tongue feeling heavy and barely able to form the words. 

Charles Xavier, twenty two and back from his search for himself all over Europe and the southern United States, had come back to New York, to the Hellfire Club, to confront his stepfather. It hadn’t gone as planned. Marko’s guards got to him as soon as he’d pulled the gun. One shot, even through the Kevlar, was enough. It had pressed right against his spine, severing the connection, and he’d never gotten the chance to put a bullet between Marko’s eyes. Just as well because he would have surely ended up in jail. Although being in his chair was a prison sentence all its own, a daily reminder that he’d been too rash, too stupid, too young to try to fix mistakes that had been made long before he was born. The papers never caught wind of how he’d actually been injured, usually citing a car crash (like the one his father had died in, but his damage had been done by a stray bullet as well). It was news to him that Erik should have been there at all. That Erik would know anything about Charles’s life outside of the tabloids. 

“I--I think I’m the one that--” Erik trails off, plainly frustrated, and curls into himself, deeper into the porthole. “You’ve got to understand. I was well under Shaw’s thumb at that point. There isn’t a way out of that. Even now. That’s part of why I wanted to see you so soon. I’m still taking care of this stuff. Still under his thumb even after I dumped his body in the fucking Hudson.” Charles shivers, remembering the reports about the damage done to Sebastian Shaw’s body when the divers had managed to pull him out. He’d been rammed through with a metal pipe. Part of why Erik had never been arrested or even seriously questioned about Shaw’s death despite being the only person with him at the time of his death was because the police didn’t believe a human being was capable of the strength necessary to do that to another human being. Charles didn’t want to know. Luckily, Erik presses on. “I was there because Shaw knew you were coming. I--I fired the shot that--” 

Charles tries to remember that night. It would have been hazy even if he hadn’t tried to bury it under years of East coast patented denial and drugs. He didn’t remember Erik. “Do you know that or are you just guessing? There were a lot of bullets that night.” 

“I--I’m guessing, but--” 

“Then stop.” Charles wishes he could pull himself closer, but he’s already had to suffer the indignity of being carried bridal style up to this suite, he doesn’t want Erik to see him drag himself across the ground. “As you said yourself, you were well under Shaw’s thumb at that time. Certainly you don’t blame yourself for all the things you’ve done before or since?” 

Erik’s eye sockets look hollow when he turns back to face Charles, his neck cracking as he whips his head around. “Don’t I? No one chooses to live like this, Charles.” 

“I did.” It’s the truth, but he can see how Erik wouldn’t believe him. If he knew Marko, he knew what kind of life Charles had had growing up. Or enough to fill in the blanks. But Charles didn’t really think that life worked like that--bad childhood, bad adulthood, doomed to make the same fallible mistakes of everyone in the caste you were born into. It wasn’t a straight drop off. There had been a choice. Charles had chosen to end up at the Hellfire Club that night. He’d chosen to fall in with the wrong people and the wrong drug. He’d chosen to wheel himself to the end of this elementary school’s parking lot and willfully entangle his life with Erik Lehnsherr’s, for better or worse. 

“Yes, you did. In a mansion that you inherited after your mother died, shooting all of your dead father’s money into your veins.” There’s no venom in his voice, which almost makes it worse. A pointless snakebite, then. Not meant to defend, but to hurt. “You chose well. If only I’d made the same choice.” 

“I’m not saying--I know I’ve been afforded certain privileges, I’m not blind to that. I know that my association with the Hellfire Club was not as--intense as yours. What I’m trying to say is that no one’s life has this pre-planned trajectory. You’ve always got a choice. I mean, look at how Raven and Cain turned out.” 

“Did he hit Cain?” 

The question itself is like a closed fist to his chest. Charles huffs in a breath, the air thinning out and going straight to his head again. “No. No, he didn’t hit Cain.” 

“Then I think that explains a lot about how Raven and Cain turned out.” 

“Nothing is set in stone, Erik. And why do I get the feeling you’re not even really talking about me, anyway?” 

Erik’s let his cigarette burn down completely, too engrossed in arguing with Charles to properly smoke. He blows the flame out and flicks it behind him and onto the wood chips below. “I have to go to New York. Sort out the Hellfire Club. It wouldn’t look good for you to be--found. With me. Associated with me or my people.” 

“Your people? You mean Shaw’s people?” 

“Sebastian Shaw has been dead for ten years.” Erik’s voice is as hollowed out as his eye sockets had seemed, utterly unmoved. Dead. 

“Yes, yes, he has.” Charles scrambles forward a little, tucking his legs underneath him. He knows it’s not a comfortable position, that he can pinch the blood vessels that he can’t feel and cause himself damage if he stays like that too long, but he wants Erik to see the real conviction on his face. “And you made a _choice_. You got out, the only what you knew how. I’ve no doubt you intended that to be a permanent choice.” 

“My hands were tied. I didn’t kill Shaw to get out. I got out when I killed Shaw, but that just… running away. Running away from who I really am. What I’ve done to get here.” Erik’s jaw is set, ticking, his teeth clearly clenched. 

“Get where? Selling marijuana up in this treehouse? There’s a huge difference between that and being Sebastian Shaw.” Erik pushes a quick puff of air out of his nose. “Is there something you’re not telling me? I don’t understand why you’re acting like I’m speaking of fairy tales.” 

“Because you _are_.” Charles physically recoils from the snarl in Erik’s voice, letting his legs fall back, uselessly, in front of him. “You think this is some kind of black and white film where the bad guys are always wearing the black hats. This is real life, Charles. And I’m not--I haven’t just been moving marijuana up here and I haven’t severed all the ties I should have severed. I couldn’t leave--There are people that are counting on me. It’s time I made the right _choice_.” That one is venom, stinging up and down Charles’s spine. Maybe it was Erik that had shot him. It would certainly explain this almost preternatural draw his severed nerves felt towards the man. 

“What did Shaw do to you?” It’s barely more than a whisper, but Erik stands up, his body coiled, ready to strike. 

He closes the distance between them in two long strides, his face inches away from Charles. His breath is hot on Charles’s cheeks, smelling like menthols and fire and something else--maybe the brimstone of a real dragon. “What did Marko do to you?” 

Charles blinks and doesn’t think about it, leaning forward to smash their mouths together. Erik makes a startled sound, but his lips part easily enough, breathing fire into Charles’s mouth. Charles fists his hands up on the back of Erik’s shirt, trying to pull him closer, swallow him whole. Erik moves Charles’s legs, carefully, and slots himself between them, letting Charles lead otherwise. He puts a hand on Charles’s neck, his fingers cold, but electric. 

They pull away from each other after what feels like hours and there are tears in the corners of Erik’s eyes. Charles tries to swipe at them with a thumb, but Erik jerks away, just out of his reach. He wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, but it seems to be more about himself than trying to smear away traces of Charles. 

“Shaw used to tell me this story.” Erik’s voice sounds like it’s far away. Smaller somehow. The voice of the boy that Charles had not remembered meeting at the Hellfire Club ten years ago. “A bedtime story. About a prince. His parents had died. They’d been murdered by a terrible dragon and the dragon took the boy away, leaving the kingdom empty. No heir. The kingdom thought the boy had died, too, but they’d never found his bones. The dragon always spit out the bones, a challenge to any knights that would come and try to kill him. But the dragon had kept the boy and raised him to be a great warrior. The only person in the kingdom who could actually kill a dragon, but because the prince had no one else, and didn’t remember all the subjects that needed him in his kingdom, he’d never kill the dragon. Knights came and the prince watched them die terrible deaths. There were other prisoners, mostly beautiful maidens. The prince came to love and protect them with all his heart, but he also heard what they were saying. About how the dragon had done terrible things to get them. That he was still doing terrible things to keep them. How much they wanted to run away, back to the prince’s kingdom. And then there was a knight. One knight that came because he believed the prince was still alive. He intended to rescue him and all of the dragon’s captives. Before the dragon could kill him, the prince turned on the dragon and asked him to answer for all of his crimes. Asked him about his life before the dragon. The prince killed the dragon. But he never went back to his kingdom. He became a dragon in his own right and he killed the knight.” 

Charles doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, doesn't blink. “That’s what Shaw said was going to happen to me. He’s always told me that’s what’s going to happen to me. It’s useless, Charles. The story has already been written.” 

“This isn’t his bedtime story, Erik. This is real. I’m not a knight. I can’t even walk, I’m not about to go killing dragons for you.” 

Erik’s smile is sad and as distant as the rest of him, lost in the past, unreachable. “And a dragon made it so. A dragon put you in that chair. A dragon made sure you’d never fight again.” 

Charles knows Erik isn’t talking about Shaw, but his throat closes up around the words of forgiveness. He doesn’t blame Erik. He doesn’t even blame Shaw or Marko or his father for getting the both of them involved in his life before he was old enough to see the web of lies. He only blames himself. The same way Erik only blames himself. But he can’t say any of that, a lump obstructing his every word. 

“I’m going to New York tomorrow. Whatever this is, it’s done. Do you understand?” Charles mutely nods, feeling like the lump is spreading, traveling down his esophagus to ground itself like cement in his chest. “Now come on. I’ll carry you back to the chair and get you home.” 

Charles holds his arms tight across Erik’s chest, his useless legs locked together around Erik’s stomach. He presses his nose into the crook of Erik’s neck and breathes hard, trying to commit it all to memory. But he knows that everything he tries to remember slips through him like he’s a sieve and Erik doesn’t want to be held onto.


End file.
